Delhi Nirankari samagam protests, November 1978

Who: Delhi's Sikhs, with the Delhi Akali Dal president Jathedar Avtar Singh Kohli; the Sant Nirankari Mission under Baba Gurbachan Singh; the Delhi Police and Central Reserve Police; Jan Sangh workers; and a five-man panel headed by Hukam Singh, a former Speaker of the Lok Sabha, appointed by the SGPC and the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee.

What: The Sikh panel says the protest was against the Government's permission to Gurbachan Singh of the Sant Nirankari Mandal to hold his samagam at the India Gate grounds on 4, 5 and 6 November 1978. ThePrint says the Union Government under Morarji Desai let the Nirankaris hold a three-day samagam in Delhi and that the Delhi Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee planned a protest march. Gurmit Singh's account:

• 4 November: the Nirankaris took out a procession and the Sikhs' counter-march ended in violence. Gurmit Singh writes that Avtar Singh Kohli was hit on the head by a police tear-gas shell and killed. Darshan Singh and a 13-year-old boy, Maninder Singh, were also killed, and nine Sikhs were injured.
• 5 November: disturbances and a curfew; a policeman was killed and six buses were burnt.
• 6 November: trouble in Tilak Nagar, and the curfew was extended.

Gurmit Singh adds that Jan Sangh workers provided a protection force for the Nirankaris and some Arya Samaj leaders spoke in their support, so that Sikhs came to feel the majority community was patronising the Nirankaris to finish off the separate identity of the Sikh faith.

The Sikh panel's report says the police threw dozens of tear-gas shells into Gurdwara Bangla Sahib and entered it with boots on, fired 45 rounds without provocation, killing at least three and wounding more than 100, and burst tear-gas shells into a van holding arrested Sikhs, which killed Kohli. It says the police imposed a 24-hour curfew for three days around Gurdwara Bangla Sahib and Gurdwara Rakab Ganj, and kept 28 young men from Mayapuri overnight in a room of 10 feet by 8 feet at Delhi Cantonment police station. It says the president of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, Jaswant Singh Sethi, had agreed with the Lieutenant-Governor and the Police Commissioner a week earlier that jathas would march on 5 November from Bangla Sahib to Windsor Place and be arrested there. It records that the police alleged some Sikhs attacked them with drawn swords, and says no one had been arrested for it. ThePrint says three people died and that two Sikh Union ministers, Surjit Singh Barnala and Dhanna Singh Gulshan, resigned in the aftermath. These are the panel's charges; the sources opened for this page do not give a police or official finding.

Where: Delhi: the India Gate grounds, Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, Windsor Place, Gurdwara Rakab Ganj, Tilak Nagar and Mayapuri.

Why it mattered: It came about five weeks after the killing of Sikhs at Kanpur and, in Gurmit Singh's account, hardened the Sikh sense that the state and the majority community stood behind the Nirankaris. He writes that the feeling received a further impetus from the verdict of the Karnal sessions judge, who acquitted Baba Gurbachan Singh and his 61 co-accused of the killing of Sikhs at Amritsar on 13 April 1978.